Dual Heart Rate Monitors?

Pseudocyber

Are there any heart rate monitors that are "dual" - the normal radio that talks to exercise devices, watches, etc. And BlueTooth to talk to smartphones and computers?

beccarockslife

yes there are! Ermmm....one sec...some of the Polar ones do....http://store.runkeeper.com/shop/product/fitness_sensors/RK_POLAR

BenKnowsFitness

Long winded answer coming up...
I’ve only use the chest strap and watch combo version of the heart rate monitor. I had a timex ironman for a while but after 10 years it started glitching here and there. I went to walmart and picked up a $40 dollar proform that has worked well. The proform will also give you touch heart rate from simply touching the frame around the face of the watch. I found the touch and chest strap features to be equivalent and accurate. My wife got a similar HRM from walmart but the touch for pulse feature did not work (and she does not care because she only uses chest strap). I was pleasantly surprised one day when I found out that my treadmill was amazingly displaying my heart rate. I figured out that there must be a standard HRM protocol because the information was coming from my proform chest strap and it was not a proform treadmill.

I have dreamed of fancier monitors. Garmin has a line that will dam near make you a mobile communications center. There are units for the bike, the human, the dog. They track position and pace and HR. I don’t know how but the bike gizmo can track pedaling cadence and tire speed. When you are done you just hold them in the proximity of your home computer and it’ll perform an automatic data extraction with enough charts and graphs to keep an engineer busy for hours. Timex also had a fancy HRM/GPS that would map your course out (oh, so much data, elevation, incline, decline, speed, distance, pace, average, std deviation, integro-differo analyses with third order curve fittings or a cubic spline or two, HR, ohhhh, so much fun to analyze).

For anyone who made it this far…sorry, but I don’t believe in the HRM calorie count or any other calorie count output from an exercise device (except the vox thingy but really, we can’t all get one of those
). I think the information from the HRM is useful though, it tells you a relative level of exertion which is good to know.

Pseudocyber

yes there are! Ermmm....one sec...some of the Polar ones do....http://store.runkeeper.com/shop/product/fitness_sensors/RK_POLAR

Are you sure about that - seems it's just blue tooth:

Will this transmitter work with my Polar wrist unit that I currently own?
This transmitter will not work with your existing Polar wrist unit because it uses a different transmission technology then our regular models.

Amazon review:

This device has one major fault, The standard analog Polaris transmitter is completely omitted. This means it will not work with existing Polaris receivers or other compatible equipment such as treadmills. This means yet another piece of gear to sort through depending on the workout you want. Headed to gym get the standard one, headed for a run get the bluetooth one. I strongly suspect that including the standard transmitter would have added an undetectable weight and reduced battery life from 150 hours to 145. But it would have made it much more useful to have both simultaneously broadcast.

Tankplanker

Why do you need it to work with both?

I've the Polar Bluetooth strap hooked up to my Galaxy S2 and it does everything I want, GPS tracking, mapping & route planning, speed (current, average and max), all the usual heart rate stuff and it'll even shout at me if I'm not pushing hard enough. Much cheaper route that buying a traditional watch based HRM if you need all those features and already own a smart phone.

Pseudocyber

I'd like to use my phone - so the bluetooth. And I've got a race coming up which doesn't allow phones/music players - so a watch type.

Tankplanker

I think you are going to need two in that case.

BenKnowsFitness

I think that the Wahoo Fitness "Wahoo Key" will allow nd Iphone to monitor most HR chest strap transmitters. Better not tell my wife or I'll be out 80 bucks.

Pseudocyber

I think that the Wahoo Fitness "Wahoo Key" will allow nd Iphone to monitor most HR chest strap transmitters. Better not tell my wife or I'll be out 80 bucks.

Looks cool, but I have an Android phone (DroidX).